“Everything had been tried.”

All I read of David Foster Wallace was his piece on Roger Federer in the Times Play Magazine two years ago. I didn’t finish his Atlantic item on talk-radio hosts. I think I skipped over his last story in the New Yorker, a short piece with paragraphs that were way too long. No Infinite Jest for me. And still, though I had no particular attachment, I find that I’m shaken by his death.

He was still young, a member of that amazing group of writers who did their MFAs at UA in the mid-1980s (Richard Russo, Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson were some of the others); I’m sure his age is one reason I’m still thinking about him a couple of days after the news broke. And maybe more important, he was still young in his writer’s voice; the one thing I held onto from the Federer piece was his enthusiasm for his subject. It was invigorating. It was great reading.

My first reaction, when I read the account in the LA Times, was a spurt of anger–You did that to your wife? The obituary in the NY Times quelled that; he’d been suffering for a long time:

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

So no anger now (except at that devil depression). I’m off to read this story, from 10 years ago in Harper’s. The New Republic has a good selection of additional links, for the uninitiated.

Update: A fine eulogy from Laura Miller in Salon, here.